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Florida Supreme Court allows county clerks to post records online

No longer, the Florida Supreme Court has ruled, will men and women have to take off from work or worry about when the courthouse closes just to see their records.

Instead, a 2006 ban against giving the public access to court records was lifted. In its place, the Supreme Court outlined guidelines for how clerks of court can make records more readily available, if they choose to do so.

Duval County Clerk of Courts Ronnie Fussell was unavailable to answer questions about the order released last week, but spokesman Charlie Broward said the clerk’s staff will discuss and decide if it wants to open access to records. Broward said he’s not yet heard anything negative about it.

Duval County allows attorneys and certain qualified people to see records online, but the general public has to use courthouse computers for detailed documents.

The Supreme Court already allowed county chief judges to permit records online in important cases, like Duval County did for the Michael Dunn case.

In 2006, the Supreme Court issued the order in response to allegations Social Security Numbers were posted to the Internet.

“Two competing yet important values must be balanced in any responsible set of policies: openness and transparency in court records, on the one hand, and individual privacy, on the other hand,” one of several administrative orders in 2006 read.

“The Court supports the goal of remote electronic access to court records and agrees with the Committee on Privacy and Court Records that at present the necessary conditions do not exist to permit a general, unrestricted distribution of court records,” another 2006 administrative order read.

Manatee County Clerk of Court R.B. “Chips” Shore had provided records online in his county since 2000. He offered to use his office as a pilot program to test how to provide the records online. Since 2007, the Office of the State Courts Administrator monitored the program.

“To be able to balance the public’s right to know and to protect the public’s rights, it’s taken a long time to get to that point,” Shore said.

The new order’s calculations determining who should get access to which documents were based on the Manatee County program. In Manatee County, except for lengthy documents like depositions, records are automatically redacted and made available to anybody. To view those lengthy depositions, someone only needs to click a button requesting it. Within 24 hours, Shore said, it will be posted online.

Shore said, he immediately trimmed costs. He cut five staff members from the recording division, or half the department, and he said he saved the public’s time.

“These people who look the documents up used to come to the office,” he said. “That takes a lot of time walking to the office and everything else. We would need to have someone looking it up for you.”

Now, he said, people view the documents at their leisure.

“In all the time we’ve had it out there, I’ve had two complaints,” he said. “And those complaints were from people who discovered they had their criminal records out there, and I don’t really feel all that sorry for them, I guess.”

Shore has offered to give his source code to any clerk in Florida.

Christina Blakeslee, who oversaw Manatee County’s pilot program for the Office of the State Courts Administrator, said it will be a while before other counties put records online. First, they must apply for approval and meet a 90-day monitoring requirement.

If Duval County decides to put its records online, Broward said, it will probably save the county money, though the initial start might cost. The current website is ready to handle posting records.

“It benefits everyone,” he said. “Anything that we can put online does, to be able to be at your living room or your office or at your newsroom and be able to pull up your computer and look at something that you may have had to come down here to do.